1) Have you added or modified any databse tables within the ispconfig database as you installed this awstats thing? If yes, then this caused the problem. You have to undo these modifications and then rerun the update by following the manual update instructions from the release notes.

2. My ISP is not blocking anything. I have confirmed with them. It was working for a good 6 month period

Is it possible that the update have not reconfigured the services as it threw an error because of awstats. Is there a way to redo the update? because now if i try to update it says that it is already the latest version.

Also is there anything else i can check regarding the connection timeout problem. Please not that sending email to a different user on the same domain is also impossible.